Comments on White House social networking content to be archived

The White House wants to archive user comments on their Facebook, MySpace, etc. pages. CNSnews reports that some people seem to think this is a threat to privacy:

“This is a huge, secretive effort by the White House to capture web material far beyond what is required by the Presidential Records Act, which only requires archiving materials produced by the president and his staff at the Executive Office of the President,” said NLPC chairman Ken Boehm in a statement to CNSNews.com Monday.

but others don't agree:

However, Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he did not believe the White House RFQ for this project was cause for alarm.

I don't agree with the administration's position that the PRA (Presidential Records Act) requires that this content be archived. The assertion is just plain silly, as social networking sites did not yet exist when the PRA was passed in 1978, and to the best of my knowledge has not been interpreted to require indefinite retention of all physical correspondence to the White House. That said -- I think that archiving these comments is a great idea! No one has proposed sneaking into your computer and recording your personal correspondence, only things that you have chosen both to make public, and to post to White House pages. Additionally, no one is stopping you from using something like Tor to post anonymously your very own modern-day Silence Dogood letters. What this move will accomplish is to provide to future historians something they've never had before -- extensive examples of what the people themselves have had to say about their government, not filtered through the mainstream media. Anything we post to the internet that is not behind some very good security and authentication measures is public and published -- just as if you'd written it in a book to be stocked in every public library and book store out there. People need to come to terms with that. If you don't want anyone to stick what you've published on a shelf for all eternity, don't publish it! I don't say this often, but, good going, President Obama!